Lutz Mackensen

Lutz Mackensen (born June 15, 1901 in Bad Harzburg , † March 24, 1992 in Bremen ) was a German linguist , folklorist and lexicographer .

Life

Lutz Mackensen was the son of a high school teacher. He studied at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin and at the University of Greifswald . In 1918 he became a member of the Corps Baltia Berlin . He received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1922 with a thesis on fairy tale research .

Mackensen worked in Greifswald from 1926 to 1932 as a lecturer in German and Nordic philology. There he founded the Pomeranian Folk Song Archive and then in 1929 the Folklore Archive for Pomerania . Mackensen succeeded in establishing the subject of folklore at the University of Greifswald. The Folklore Archive also included older, non-university Pomeranian folklorists such as Alfred Haas and Otto Knoop in its intensive and dedicated work . Mackensen's assistant at the Folklore Archive was Karl Kaiser , who followed him in 1933 in the management of the archive. Mackensen also cultivated international scientific relations in his subject in Greifswald: in 1932 he organized a conference with Swedish folklorists, which paved the way for a connection to Swedish folklore research.

In 1932 Mackensen left Greifswald and became an associate professor at the Herder Institute in Riga .

After the seizure of the Nazi regime , he joined the 1933 Nazi one. In 1935 he became a full professor. In 1937 Mackensen published the treatise Folklore in Decision . During the Second World War , he was initially visiting professor at the University of Ghent in 1940 and provided reports on other lecturers who “make propaganda against Greater Germanic thought in their lectures, more or less hidden”. From 1941 he was a professor of German literature at the State University of Wartheland in Poznan , where directly responsible for the re- Germanization of belonging to Poland, but in 1939 the Wehrmacht occupied territory . Mackensen had a line loyalty, i. H. "Volkish" sentiments and an open commitment to anti-Semitism qualified for this task and was raised to this position at the instigation of the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg . He was u. a. responsible for the recording of legends, traditions and customs from which a settlement of the region by Germans or Germans since the Bronze Age can be proven. He also supervised the measures for the integration of ethnic Germans from the territory of the Soviet Union in the framework of the Hitler-Stalin Pact from their previous settlements ( Volyn , the Baltics , Bessarabia , the Bukovina and Dobrogea forcibly relocated), and in order to "re-Germanization" (Mackensen ) of the Wartheland u. a. were resettled in the districts of Langensalza and Posen. As part of the above-mentioned tasks, Mackensen and his staff had to check, on behalf of the NS Gauleitung and the SD, to what extent the "repatriates" had retained their Germanness and, due to their racial characteristics, were suitable to create a "new settler tribe" of "borderland farmers" who were ready to fight. to build.

After the Second World War, Mackensen was able to gain academic foothold again and worked first in Göttingen and then as a professor for reuse in Lübeck. But he shifted his creative focus from cultivating Germanness to cultivating the German language. His best-known work is a German dictionary , first published in 1951. It was published several times and was often referred to simply as Mackensen . Other works by him deal with German etymology . He also wrote reference works, collections of quotations, homeland books and style primers and wrote about individual words and concepts.

In 1957 Mackensen was the founder and until 1966 head of the German press research department at the Bremen State Library .

Publications (selection)

• 3876 first names: origin, derivations, etc. Pet forms, distribution, famous bearers of names, memorial u. Name days , Südwest-Verlag, 1969
• The daily vocabulary: a dictionary f. Office, school etc. House. Word use, word meaning, word inflection, spelling, punctuation marks, foreign words, idioms, names, rule part , Olten; Stuttgart; Salzburg: Fackel-Verlag, 1970
• The modern dictionary of foreign words: Over 32,000 keywords. Meaning, origin, pronunciation, inflection, word combinations , Munich: Südwest-Verlag, 1971, ISBN 978-3-517-00326-9
• Stauferzeit , Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1979, ISBN 978-3-8204-6481-8
• The Nibelungen: saga, history, their song and his poet , Stuttgart: Hauswedell, 1984, ISBN 3-7762-0228-9
• Origin of the words: etymolog. Dictionary d. German language , Munich: Südwest-Verlag, 1985, ISBN 978-3-517-00858-5
• The technical term in daily use: d. Current dictionary with over 25,000 terms , Berlin: Ullstein, 1986, ISBN 978-3-548-34311-2
• The modern lexicon of foreign words: origin, word combinations, meaning, pronunciation , Munich: Heyne, 1991, ISBN 978-3-453-04815-7

literature

• Helmut Henne: Look at Mackensen! It leads you where you don't want to ... In: Sprachreport , Volume 26, Issue 4, 2010, pp. 2-6 (critical examination of Mackensen, especially his attitude during the Nazi era and his dictionary).
• Carola L. Gottzmann / Petra Hörner: Lexicon of the German-language literature of the Baltic States and St. Petersburg . 3 volumes; Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-11-019338-1 . Volume 2, pp. 872-873.

Footnotes

1. ↑ Erwin Willmann (Ed.): Directory of the old Rudolstädter Corps students. (AH. List of the RSC.) , 1928 edition, No. 2908
2. ↑ Cf. Carola L. Gottzmann, Petra Hörner: Lexicon of German-Language Literature of the Baltic States and St. Petersburg , 2007.
3. ^ Kurt Dröge : The development of folklore research in Pomerania. In: Roderich Schmidt (Ed.): A thousand years of Pomeranian history. Publications of the Historical Commission for Pomerania. Series V, Volume 31. Böhlau Verlag, Cologne Weimar Vienna 1999, pp. 358–359.
4. ^ Leopold Magon: The history of the Nordic studies and the foundation of the Nordic Institute . In: Festschrift for the 500th anniversary of the University of Greifswald . Volume 2. Greifswald 1956, p. 265.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 384.
6. ^ Quote from Ernst Klee: Kulturlexikon , p. 384, with reference to Ludwig Jäger , Seitenwechsel. The Schneider / Schwerte case and the discretion of German studies , Munich 1998.
7. ↑ The Germanist Utz Maas wrote in retrospect: "Mackensen regrets in 1937 that the German people in the late Middle Ages were already so racially decomposed that they did not finally solve the Jewish question with the pogroms of the time [...]." See Maas, Die Entwicklung of German-language linguistics from 1900 to 1950 between professionalization and politicization. In: Zeitschrift für Germanistische Linguistik 16 (1988/89), pp. 253-290; here: p. 282.
8. ↑ See u. a. his essay Language and Race. In: National Socialist Monthly Issues  6 (1935), pp. 306-315.
9. ↑ See u. a. the introduction to Lutz Mackensen: Legends of the Germans in the Wartheland. With a foreword by the district captain. Edited by the Gau self-government and the University of Posen. Folklore Vol. 8. Poznan 1943.
10. ↑ Mackensen: Legends of the Germans in the Wartheland , pp. III – IV.
11. ^ Lutz Mackensen: German Etymology. A guide through the history of the German word. (Bremen 1962) Berlin / Darmstadt / Vienna 1966.
12. ↑ Lutz Mackensen: Origin of Words. 4th edition, 2004, VMA-Vertriebsgesellschaft, ISBN 3-928127-47-0 , 446 pages.
13. ^ Lutz Mackensen: Quotes, sayings, proverbs. Approved special edition 1992, Naumann and Göbel, ISBN 3-625-10106-8 , 887 pages.

Web links

• Literature by and about Lutz Mackensen in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Lutz Mackensen  in the German Digital Library